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No. We have a saying for this in Hungary, it is called “the case of the stolen coat”. If you run around yelling that someone stole your coat, people will forget about it and half a year later they will only remember that this guy had something to do with a coat stealing case. Which probably means he is a fucking coat-stealing thief. NO HIRE. Or even in the best case he is sort of the guy who somehow attracts trouble, has poor luck, so NO HIRE.

The same way how most people would not want to hire a woman rape victim, even if she was 200% innocent do you want to import a bunch of emotional problems, trauma, suffering and suchlike into your organization or you want to have generally sunny, optimistic, happy people in there? You would not want to hire people who are open about a problem in their past, because by “buying” them you bought their problem too.

This means don’t ever get publicly associated with anything bad, not even as an innocent victim!

First of all report it to the police or try to see who has access to ISP logs legally.

Second close and delete your old blog, hope your real name is not that widespread so that you can always deny it was about you, probably close this one as well, and 6 months later start a new one under a pseudonym but strictly avoiding any kind of personal information, like, don’t say you are a doctor, don’t talk about your relationship with Ozy etc. only write from an impersonal angle.

This is my advice.

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Like, nothing Arthur has said is novel or interesting or particularly concerning. He’s basic.

Land, however, is not messing around ideologically. His thesis that intelligence/self-cultivation/growth is maximizing the dissipation of entropy – maximizing the capacity to do work – is not super original**, but he makes it explicit and develops it in a bunch of very interesting and impactful ways.

And he’s got very good arguments illustrating that this fundamental thermodynamic force – “intelligence”, “evolution”, “techno-economic growth”, etc. – is not necessarily our friend. As soon as humans and human values cease to be aligned with ‘increase the dissipation of entropy’, the world will cease to be a nice place for humans. This is what you’re getting at with Moloch, I think. So on the big picture, you guys seem to be relatively close.

But in terms of values and the moral direction of society, Land gets really ugly. As an explicit and unrepentant accelerationist, he’s basically arguing that we should continue to feed into this entropy-maximization process until it eats us and spits out the machine gods that replace us. He’s also pretty big on human extinction and other petty doomsterisms, too.

I do not want to see a Landian century. I would like very much to combat Land’s accelerationist theses, and I am glad that you do as well.

I think a good first line of attack would be to talk about how the development of the physical world doesn’t jump straight to the maximal entropy state–there are really a whole bunch of paths through state-space towards the maximal entropy state, and some are more human-friendly than others.

27chaos posted a fascinating comment here recently linking to an article about the explanatory power of genetic algorithms in physics, and how they are an analogue of entropy-dissipation-maximization. One of the differences between genetic algorithms and entropy-maximization is that geneticism emphasizes the plurality of possible paths forward–a tree structure with branches occasionally culled.

Making this point will oppose the cosmic inexorability in Land’s ideology. Sure, in the long run we’re all screwed, but there’s a whole lot of possibility between here and the end. We do have a ten-thousand mile head start on Moloch–how can we extend it? Presumably by either increasing capacity to do work (accelerationist), by increasing the amount of resources we store for the future without investing in growth, or by intentionally relaxing selection pressures (troubling in its own way). If we’re smart and creative, spectacular human flourishing can be aligned with entropy-maximization for a long while still.

Another important point of opposition will be to develop the concepts relating human values to this world-value of entropy-maximization. As much as I love your Meditations on Moloch, I think that you sorta garbled the issue a little bit. Like, you partially sketched out an explicit abstract picture and illustrated it with examples, but you kept trying to translate it up into the whole anthropomorphic vocabulary; this translation wasn’t clean, and Land’s “Gnon” came out as simpler and more powerful.

That whole anthropomorphism/new-agey crap is another (easy, trivial) point of opposition. It’s a lazy way to talk and think, and it’s a bad and epistemically dangerous way to talk and think. Same goes for his hip, continental-ish writing style. Seems cool and edgy, is occasionally good for threading together disparate ideologies, is often bad because obfuscation. I’m over it, and I don’t want to see it spread.

The final main conflict (that I can yet see) will be over his thesis that accelerationism is the only theoretically or methodologically consistent principle. He argues that all human values were created by the process that maximizes the dissipation of entropy, or that this entropy-dissipation is what underlies our idea of “good” in all magisteria. And so, “what we really want is [maximizing the dissipation of entropy].”

I’m tempted to agree with him here, which troubles me a lot. On one hand, I want to think that a global society could be founded on common human values: love, family, friends, cooperation, good food, etc etc. I think your Elua-metaphor does good work here. However, I’m skeptical that there could be a truly cosmic or universal society that did not explicitly and only value the maximization of the dissipation of entropy–this is the core “value” underlying the great plurality of values. The rise of capitalism as a global unifying principle is evidence for the latter position, and Land is quick to advance on this.

I don’t yet know how to rightly oppose him here. I think that diving deeper into genetic algorithms might provide some insight/escape routes. Formulating the problem in terms of entropy-dissipation probably gives Landian acceleration the advantage. We need to explicitly establish the (large) gap between maximally dissipating strategies and deleterious strategies, because it’s somewhere within that gap that we flourish.

Of course, as much as I want to oppose Land, I still love and respect his writing and thinking. He’s immensely interesting and important, but his ideology will steer us in a deathwards direction, and that’s bad.

I’m very curious as to what else you see as the main conflict with Land, and how you intend to oppose him. How can we coordinate an anti-Landian opposition, so to speak?

Now, I just need to get off my ass and start writing. Mine is not a dogmatic slumber so much as a lazy-and-tired slumber, and that’s sad. As always, advice and suggestions on overcoming are welcome.

** For others arguing the same general point, see ‘Causal Entropic Forces’ by Wissner-Gross & Freer, or ‘Empowerment: A Universal Agent-Centric Measure of Control’ by Klyubin et al and the attendant literature. ‘Energy Rate Density as a Complexity Metric and Evolutionary Driver’ by Chaisson seems to be excellent on the same, but I only skimmed it and can’t endorse fully.

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Which is to say, using such companies can seriously backfire, sometimes years later. It may still be a net win, but…

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